Art.

Chicago's Newest Art Museum

Long-fought Battle Finally Won

Somewhere lying under some dead-rot foliage where even your breath can give your hiding place away . . .

Somewhere in a water-slogged rice paddy with the green shoots slicing at your skin and the bottom muck pulling you down by your boots . . .

Somewhere on a raw red-dirt hill with trees, toothpicked by artillery shells, still smoldering black and hot to the touch . . .

This whole thing began.

That was many years ago during the Vietnam War, and yet it was just yesterday.

Yesterday is here now and it is in the form of Chicago's newest art museum, which opens Sunday, just in time for the Democratic National Convention. And what irony that it should open in the city of such publicized discord over Vietnam during the last political convention here, in 1968.

The new Vietnam Veterans Art Museum flicks on the lights and opens wide its doors this afternoon for the first time to the national press, to the mayor, to the veterans who fought so long to create it, and to the world.

What was once an abandoned warehouse, three stories high, littered with debris and "a tomb for rats" as one artist put it, has been transformed into a museum for the only collection of its kind in the world.

Every watercolor, oil, sketch, painting, sculpture and photograph was done by a combatant in America's most divisive war. It was done by men and women, officers and enlisted men, draftees and volunteers, fighter pilots and grunts. They all came home with something to say about what they'd seen and, with few willing to listen, turned their statements quietly into art.

A couple of veterans from Chicago, Ned Broderick and Joe Fornelli, both artists, began collecting these expressions from fellow vets. Work poured in from across the country. The collection had several showings, well attended, but it was basically ignored by the art world. "I don't want to get a brick through my window," said one gallery owner.

This collection has had a long history of being nowhere, until it opened briefly a year ago in a makeshift gallery at 18th and Indiana. Lois Weisberg, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs, attended. She liked it a lot.

Weisberg got Mayor Richard Daley to go see it. He stayed two hours and asked how long the veterans had kept the collection together. He was told 20 years. He asked about their budget. They replied, "What budget?" He asked how long they could keep the exhibit open. They said not long.

"We are going to so something about this," he said. And he did. He gave them the old abandoned warehouse across the street. He got them $1 million to start off with, he named influential people to head a committee to help the process out, he got the city departments to kick in and cooperate, and he announced that this new museum would be the highlight of this summer's Democratic National Convention. Every single delegate and every member of the press has been invited to visit--25,000 invitations were sent out.

Thus began the birth of a new museum. It was a risky but quick delivery.

Paul Beitler, an influential Chicago developer, was asked to help this fledgling museum get on its feet. Beitler was well known as a businessman and a promoter of the arts. It was not well known that he is a Vietnam veteran.

"When I received a letter from the mayor asking my help in creating this museum, I cringed," Beitler says. "I'd spent the larger part of my life keeping my memories of Vietnam in little boxes in a closed closet. The mayor asked me to go see the exhibit, and I went with great reluctance. I knew it would cause me to go back and relive scenes from Vietnam. I saw it once and I don't know if I can see it again. It was a difficult afternoon for me that day. Then that evening I went to a meeting about forming the museum and I did what I didn't think I would ever do. I volunteered.

"Why? I don't think anyone who has ever seen this collection of art will ever shrink into the shadows again. It is that powerful."

Beitler started making calls. As a member of the board of directors of several art museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, his support carried some weight. Help and contributions began to pour in. "The response has been enormous," he says. "People are finding money where it doesn't exist."

People in the construction trades chipped in. A demolition company gutted and cleared out the old warehouse for free. A local businessman, Al Sennese, donated the paint. Union painters donated their time.

"I wasn't in Vietnam, but my brother was," says Rafael Zepeda, a union painter who showed up on a Saturday to help out. "He didn't get wounded over there, I mean his body. But all of them came home, you know, wounded right here, in their heart."

"There is an enthusiasm that I haven't seen working at other places," says Bill Keeley, one of the contractors. "For a lot of guys who were not involved in the Vietnam War, this is a chance to do something good."